Osmond Robb

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Osmond P. H. Robb was a fanartist from Edinburgh, Scotland, active in the 1930s and early 1940s. He may be the earliest known Scottish fan, although the honour may go to Marion Eadie or indeed somebody else. Robb was reading pulp magazines as early as 1937. According to online sources, he had letters in Amazing Stories, April 1937, and Weird Tales, November 1938.

He contributed a cover to the first issue of The Fantast in April 1939 as well as material for other issues, and was mentioned several times in Futurian War Digest, in the June 1944 issue of which Bill Temple wrote,:

Someone’s just sent me the Dec. 43 issue of the Leftish review Our Time (never ’eard of it!) & the first thing I see is a long letter of criticism in the correspondence columns by Osmond Robb. Is this a fan going serious?

In the April 1942 issue of Futurian War Digest, it was reported that as a conscientious objector, he was given ‘non-combatant service’ by his local tribunal and granted conditional exemption. He received enrollment notices for the National Fire Service.

There seem to be no references to him in fandom after 1944. He was later a left-wing journalist. According to Timothy Heat in Hamish Henderson: Poetry Becomes People (1952–2002), Robb was at some later point in the Crichton Royal Infirmary in Dumfries for some years where he was, per a letter to Henderson, ‘as happy here as you can be in the loony bin.’

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